* Before hiring MetroFi, the city (well, PDC to be specific) paid Intel $160,000 to assess the viability of a muni Wi-Fi network.

* The city also hired a staffer to oversee the project, and paid him $107,000 in salary and benefits over 15 months (the staffer, Logan Kleier, still works for the city but has a different job now. Logan says Wi-Fi takes no more than a tenth of his time now.)

That's $267,000 in taxpayer money, all told. (That's just the marginal cost -- it'd be substantially higher, of course, if you throw in the time pre-existing city staffers spent on the thing.)

For comparison, MetroFi estimates it has spent between $2 million and $3 million on Portland's network, which is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent complete.